Most restaurants in the United States do not serve healthful food. Many merely offer prefab foods that they place in the microwave and have you believe that there’s a chef in the back cooking up specialties. Then there are cities fortunate enough to have restaurants with high quality food that is organically grown and not laden with artificial ingredients, sugars and other deleterious substances. Amid these restaurants, however, are posers. Posers are poisoners pretending otherwise.
Take a look at Boulder, Colorado, home of the fittest, most intelligent residents in the country, statistically speaking. Organic foods here are not symbols of status or fads. People really want to eat organics so that they can avoid consuming toxic pesticides, hormone residues, synthetic fertilizers and nutritionally-depleted substances that most places pass off as food ingredients. And, in case you’re not into healthful eating, the purpose of eating this way is to avoid becoming sick now and in the future, as scientists have proven that eating anything other than natural ingredients (not tainted with manmade toxic substances) creates disease in all living beings.
Now for the posers. It has become common for many restaurants to put a caveat at the bottom of their menus stating that their dishes are made with organic ingredients “whenever possible.” The last two words, they feel, let them off the hook. The statement is like saying “our food is healthful unless it’s not.” While at first glance the “whenever possible” statement may seem honest and express that the restaurant owner is at least trying to comply, the truth is that more often than not he is hiding behind the caveat. The idea is to lure health-minded patrons into the restaurant by lying to them about the quality of the food served.
Two examples. A couple of years ago I went into Bacco Trattoria, an Italian restaurant in Boulder whose menu expressed the notice cited above. When the waiter came to take our order I asked which of the ingredients in the menu are indeed organic. He stared at me with a blank face then said he’d check with the kitchen. He came back and said that some of the beets for one of the salads is organic. That was it. Nothing else. The claim that they use organics whenever possible was just a lie. Why? Because Boulder is the capital of organics, and organic foods here are always possible. In fact, you can find a health food store within walking distance of anywhere in town that is stocked with organics. Not to serve them when you say that you do is just plain lying.
Case number two is a popular restaurant called Tangerine. When the restaurant opened, the owner proudly printed the organics-whenever-possible statement at the bottom of his menu. And he did, in fact, offer organic foods such as eggs, bacon, lettuce, coffee, vegetables and much more. But quite deceptively, over a short period of time, the owner gradually stopped offering organics by and large, yet failed to disclose this to the patrons who were counting on eating a better quality food. What is the bottom line? He lied to those patrons who really care about their health, which is an act analogous to putting sugar in your food and not notifying the diabetics who were once told that there were no sugars in the ingredients. A big fat lie.
You may think that this kind of action is a breach of trust; and you’d be right. It’s one thing to serve junk food, microwaved meals and sprayed produce while making no claims that your food is healthful. But when you make the claim that your food is healthful and you don’t follow through, then you are cheating people and poisoning them.
If you are concerned about your health then you’ll know that spinach is one of the most sprayed of all crops and that milk commonly contains steroids, growth hormones and antibiotics. If your restaurant owner tells you that he doesn’t serve these deleterious foods when he actually does, then he is guilty of far more than just misleading you; he’s guilty of making you sick.